JAKARTA, (Reuters) – Indonesian police shot dead five suspected militants in Bali overnight who had identified and surveyed targets they were planning to attack, the national counter terrorism agency said last night, and were linked to the banned Jemaah Islamiah group.
“They have several targets in several locations in Bali. They have surveyed the places,” Ansyaad Mbai, head of national counter-terrorism agency, told Reuters by phone.
Mbai described the sites as “typical terrorist targets” but declined to give further details. The group to which the suspects belonged was linked to one that had conducted bank robberies in Medan and paramilitary training in Aceh and in Solo, central Java, he said.
In 2002, night-club bombings in Bali blamed on the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah killed more than 200 people, many of them Australian tourists.
That attack was a watershed for Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, forcing the secular state to confront the presence of violent militants on its soil.
Australian media reported that Indonesia’s counter-terror police unit known as Detachment 88 stormed two separate addresses on Bali, in the capital Denpasar and at a hotel in Sanur, on Sunday night.
Three men were killed at the hotel in Sanur, an area popular with foreign tourists, and two at the Denpasar location, media said, quoting Australian Associated Press. (AAP)
